Flowering time is an important horticultural trait in almond since it is essential to avoid the late frosts that affect production in early flowering cultivars. Evaluation of this complex trait is a long process because of the prolonged juvenile period of trees and the influence of environmental conditions affecting gene expression year by year. In this research flowering time was studied in an...

In June 2005, USDA/FDA/EPA deregulated the Roundup Ready trait in alfalfa. In August 2005, seed of the first Roundup Ready alfalfa varieties was offered for sale. This was the first biotech trait to be commercialized in alfalfa, and paved the way for new research supporting a second wave of biotech traits enhancing value in alfalfa. These new biotech traits can be divided into two categories: o...

Improvement of milk production traits in dairy sheep is required to increase the competitiveness of the industry and to maintain the production of high quality cheese in regions of Mediterranean countries with less favourable conditions. Additional improvement over classical selection could be reached if genes with significant effects on the relevant traits were specifically targeted by selecti...

Understanding patterns in the distribution and abundance of functional traits across a landscape is of fundamental importance to ecology. Mapping these distributions is particularly challenging for species-rich groups with sparse trait measurement coverage, such as flowering plants, insects, and microorganisms. Here, we use likelihood-based character reconstruction to infer and analyze the spat...

This study investigated the improvement in genetic evaluation of fertility traits by using production traits as secondary traits (MILK = 305-d milk yield, FAT = 305-d fat yield, and PROT = 305-d protein yield). Data including 471,742 records from first lactations of Denmark Holstein cows, covering the years of inseminations during first lactations from 1995 to 2004, were analyzed. Six fertility...

The production of iron-scavenging siderophores by the opportunistic animal pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a textbook example of public goods cooperation. This trait provides an excellent model system with which to study cooperation. Further, the links between siderophore production and P. aeruginosa virulence allow us to investigate how pathogen ecology, social behaviour and pathology might...

Mammalian expression systems, due to their capacity in post-translational modification, are preferred systems for biopharmaceutical protein production. Several recombinant protein systems have been introduced to the market, most of which are under clinical development. In spite of significant improvements such as cell line engineering, introducing novel expression methods, gene silencing and pr...

The present study was conducted to determine egg production traits and egg quality characteristics in black and brown lines of Japanese quail. A total of 500 quails comprising 400 females and 100 males obtained from two breeding centers were raised according to the standard procedure for Japanese quail. They were grouped in according to their plumage colours. Age at first egg-laying has been re...

Longevity is a highly desirable trait that considerably affects overall profitability. With increased longevity the mean production of the herd increases because a greater proportion of the culling decisions are based on production and the proportion of mature cows, which produce more milk than young, cows is increased. An increased longevity enables higher selection intensity of females and th...